NEW DELHI, INDIA: EMC plans to invest $1.5 billion in India over the next five years (2010-2014) primarily to bolster its R&D activities in the country. This is in addition to the $500 mn investment it made three years back.

This was announced exclusively to Dataquest by David Goulden, EVP & CFO, of EMC. Subsequently, in the presence of the Karnataka CM today, the company is inaugurating its state-of-the-art Center of Excellence in Bangalore.

This new center, the largest outside the company's headquarters in Hopkinton, Boston, US, will have facilities for nearly 3500 people. Currently, excluding the sales and marketing professionals in India, EMC has more than 2100 employees involved either in R&D or in global support services or business process management activities. This new center will consolidate four locations and will be handling simultaneously 15 different product groups including some of the leading solutions from EMC.

Goulden informed that the new center will deliver R&D on new products, global services support as well as internal IT functions in that priority order.

“The investment further establishes EMC's commitment to India. Though a large part will go into R&D, we will also utilize the funds to further enhance our sales and marketing capabilities here,” he added.

Currently, EMC's strategic initiatives rest on four pillars - storage, content, security and virtualization. While the new CoE will see increasing activities on the first three fronts, most of the virtualization related work will continue to be delivered from the Vmware R&D center (a company where EMC has majority stake), also located in Bangalore. Goulden also ruled out any changes in the holding pattern of VMWare in the near future.